My comment on the blog: I couldn’t agree more. Jason Fried of 37 Signals and Tony Hsieh of Zappos would agree. In Rework, Jason claims that everything is marketing, including tech support. It’s sad that so many companies forget this.

I saw both of them speak this weekend at Big Omaha, it was amazing! Tony even told war stories of people calling in for support. One included a sales associate calling Zappos at 3 in the morning for local pizza places! What a way to build customers for life!

I think if us entrepreneurs would take this advice and the advice from Jason F and Tony… we would be one step closer to changing the world.

This is so true.

I work on a service desk in my day job, and I'm one of those mad people who has a passion for providing amazing service support and delivery. I thought it would have been common sense that if your product is subscription (or equivalent) based, your customer support service is how you ensure that people stay with you and recommend you to others.

Yet it feels like every time I have to call some customer service line, I find myself concerned for my industry as a whole. With one of my own utility providers, the only way to get actual help is to threaten to cancel my contract, and I'm sure this is a common experience.

Tech support is also quality control. I answer all requests the same day and it keeps me on my toes wrt to product quality and usability. If tech support was outsourced then all the customer pain would simply become a "call hours" number on a spreadsheet somewhere. When I hire my first employees they will all be doing tech support part-time, just so that they appreciate the impact they make.

Keeping crazies at bay is an interesting problem as well, and it can't be solved entirely by tech support itself - sometimes you have to change your message, and the most effective way is to set prices above the level where crazy people like to shop.

This is a well-made point, and one that doesn't get emphasized nearly enough, especially now that Kathy Sierra isn't publishing.

Tech support (and other customer support) is, in a huge part, your customers educating you about how your service is working and how your product is used. And if you have to go out and ask them, you don't get nearly as honest and clear information as when they can contact you at the point where they get frustrated, as difficult as that can be to deal with.

Next time one of your developers says that they think a feature is a bad idea because they "don't understand the use-case" make them do tech support for a week.

I guess the real question is: does your tech support actually talk to the people who sign the cheques? If so, this could work.

In my experience, it hasn't been at all the case at all. The people who sign the cheques often speak a very different language and tend not to even use the product themselves...that's the job of their employees.

If there's no ongoing payments, then support only provides passive sales. It can only turn disgruntled users into advocates, and reassure people that it's safe to recommend the product to others. Never discount, however, the ability for high quality support to make a great part of any sales pitch!

But when there are oportunities for ongoing payments, especially in the case where these are actually for service support (and they often are), the quality of your service support is what will be looked at when it comes to renewing the contract. And if there's no contract, the quality of your service support is the only thing standing in the way of them switching providers (unless you've implemented some type of lock-in).

From a service support point of view, the real question is does the sales force actually talk with the support team? A contract that can't be met isn't profitable.